Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S. C. Gwynne

  Jackson faced eight Mexican cannons with his two, at very short range. He immediately lost all twelve of his horses, which went down in bloody heaps and lay there, wounded or dying, in harness. Undeterred, he and his small squad unlimbered, rolled the guns forward, and started shooting back. One of the guns was hit and became immovable. The artillerymen, meanwhile, facing what seemed to be certain death, fled to the safety of a nearby ditch and bushes. But Jackson refused to leave the road. Pacing back and forth alone while shells filled the air around him, including a cannonball that rocketed between his legs, he yelled to his men, “There is no danger! See? I am not hit!” (He said later this was the first and only lie he ever told.) At first he got no takers; then, finally, an old sergeant walked up and together they dragged the remaining cannon across a ditch and up onto the road. They began firing again. As they did so, another member of the gun crew made his way forward. Instead of accepting his help, Jackson shouted, “Go back yonder! Tell Colonel Trousdale to send men forward! . . . Tell him with fifty men we can overrun the battery ahead!”

  Jackson and his sergeant now stood with a single gun on the road amid a storm of ball, solid shot, shell canister, and musket fire so severe that no one else dared raise his head above the roadside ditch. His own crew had abandoned him; the entire infantry regiment to which he had been attached had disappeared, except for a small escort. What division commander General William J. Worth saw, when he finally rode up close enough to see what was going on, was young Jackson, now in advance of the entire American army, still aiming and firing his cannon, in a virtual single-handed duel with a significant part of the Mexican army. When Worth ordered Jackson to retire, Jackson refused to obey the order, saying that it was more hazardous to retreat than to stay put.

  Magruder now arrived at the perilous scene. He immediately had his horse shot out from under him as he reached Jackson’s six-pounder, then dragged himself up and pitched in with a few others from the gun crews to salvage the second gun. Soon Jackson had both guns working again, plying sponge and handspike, and firing furiously at the Mexicans. And now things began to change. A brigade that General Worth had brought up began to make itself felt, pushing forward. On the hill above them, the defenses of Chapultepec Castle began to crumble, and the long American lines began to surge forward and upward. Chapultepec soon fell.

  But Jackson’s work was not finished. A few miles down the road, at the gates of Mexico City, Mexican general Santa Anna rallied his remaining troops. General Scott ordered another attack. Jackson, still eager to fight, quickly found wagon limbers to which he could attach his two guns, and started out at a fast pace toward the city’s San Cosme Gate. He was moving so fast, in fact, that he soon found himself well in advance of the rest of the army. In that precarious position—a mile ahead of Scott’s infantry—he encountered two other young officers who had made the same mistake: his new friend Harvey Hill and another lieutenant from South Carolina named Barnard Bee, a man Jackson knew from West Point, a year ahead of him, and who had been brevetted for gallantry at Cerro Gordo. Hill and Bee had about forty men between them, but no guns, and were talking about going back when Jackson, dragging his two guns behind ammunition caissons, rolled up and cheerfully volunteered to give them artillery cover. The three of them were discussing this when Magruder arrived and ordered them to stand down. They pleaded with him to relent. He did, and the little group took off down the road in pursuit of Mexicans.

  Half a mile down the road they came upon some 1,500 Mexican cavalry, who turned and charged at them down the narrow causeway, offering Jackson a tantalizing target. He opened fire, ripping huge bloody holes in the column. “Whenever they got a little too far,” Jackson said later, “we limbered up and pursued at full gallop until the bullets of their rear guns began to fall near the leaders, then we would unlimber and pour it into them—then limber up and pursue. We kept this up for about half a mile.”25 Thus did Jackson find himself again in the position of fighting a very large force with a very small one.

  By nightfall, the shooting had ceased; the city was not yet overrun and had not surrendered. The following morning, Jackson had his guns on high ground, trained on the San Cosme Gate. Residents had been warned that if they did not surrender by a certain hour the shelling would start again. When Mexican authorities ignored this, Jackson received an order to open fire on the main thoroughfare, filled with panicked civilians. He did so immediately; he later said that he could trace the visible line of death his guns had made. When asked many years later if he had any compunctions about killing those people, he answered, “None whatever. What business had I with results? My duty was to obey orders.”26 Later that day Winfield Scott marched into the city in triumph—the last, dramatic piece of a brilliant, bloody campaign.

  News of Jackson’s exploits, meanwhile, moved quickly through the army. There was no doubt at all about what he had done. It had been witnessed not only by his immediate superior but also by a division commander. And there was no question that the actions of this brave brevet captain had affected the course of the battle. He was singled out for lavish praise from Generals Worth and Pillow, and his name was even mentioned in the commanding general’s report—an extreme rarity for a subaltern in charge of two field artillery pieces. But the highest praise came from Scott himself. After the army had occupied Mexico City, Scott hosted a reception for army officers to which Jackson was invited. He waited in the receiving line, heard his name read out, and finally came into the presence of the massive three-hundred-pound commander. Scott regarded him, clasped his hands behind his back, raised his chin in the air, and said in a booming voice so that everyone could hear, “I don’t know if I will shake hands with Mr. Jackson!” Jackson blushed to the tips of his whiskers, and stared at the floor of the now silent hall. Scott now continued, “If you can forgive yourself for the way in which you slaughtered those poor Mexicans with your guns, I am not sure that I can!” With that, Scott held out his hand and smiled as the crowd applauded. Jackson shook it. He was thrilled. He could have received no higher form of praise. He had been on active duty for only fifteen months, and he had been promoted to first lieutenant and then to brevet major. No one in his class from West Point—indeed, no one in the entire army in Mexico—had been promoted faster. He was twenty-three years old, and in the small, tightly circumscribed world of the US Army, he was famous.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A VERY SMALL, VERY BITTER FIGHT

  In the summer of 1861, as citizens in the North and South tried to sort out what had happened on Henry Hill and Chinn Ridge, they began to discuss a new topic: their generals. A few months before, no one had cared particularly about generals, who they were, what they looked like, or what they might have done in the Mexican-American War or in some dusty Indian outpost in the West. But all that had changed. Suddenly the world was awash in these folks, with their sashes, side-whiskers, and idiosyncrasies, and because the fate of the country and the lives of thousands of young men rested in their hands, they were the objects of keen, often obsessive interest. They were the new celebrities. Names of formerly obscure, regular army types such as David Hunter and Joe Johnston now populated the pages of the newspapers and soldiers’ letters home, and the more often they appeared the more the names began to take on emblematic status. Beauregard was the dashing spirit of Southern victory, McDowell the symbol of unsettling, inexplicable Union defeat; Bee represented the notion of tragic glory, of the sacrifices that would have to be made. McClellan, remote and magnificent in Ohio and western Virginia, was the hope of the despondent North.

  Jackson was not yet among those prominent names. To the extent that anyone knew him at all, he embodied the nickname Barnard Bee had given him. He was steadfast and immovable, an iron-hard fighter who would stand on the soil of Virginia, eyes ablaze and chin tilted toward the heavens, and defy the Yankee invaders. If this seemed two-dimensional, the man his soldiers saw was scarcely more defined. Their experience of him was strictly military, all protocol a
nd logistics and army business. He did not make small talk, he rarely socialized, and he revealed little of himself to subordinates. He was usually polite, but the soft-spoken politeness itself—like his regular daily prayers, offered alone in his quarters—was a form of aloofness. Brigadier General Jackson seemed indeed like a wall: it was impossible to penetrate him.

  But Jackson was, in a larger sense, anything but opaque. After the Mexican-American War he had spent five years in the regular army, in postings that included Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida, long enough to be well known to his peers and commanders. For a full decade, from 1851 to 1861, he had lived a very visible life in Lexington, a small college town of two thousand souls where everybody knew everybody else’s business. He was deeply involved in the very small and very transparent world of VMI, where he was one of a handful of professors. He was a deacon at his church. He had married twice, owned a redbrick house in town and a modest farm outside of town, sat on the board of a local bank, and was active in the local debating society. He had several close friends. To them, and to many others in Lexington, Jackson was considerably more than this implacable, God-obsessed mystery whom people were starting to talk about. He was just Major Jackson, a shy and socially awkward man who was perhaps not a very good teacher but who had nonetheless built for himself a tidy, middle-class life—a very American story of hard work and self-betterment and modest success.

  That story begins in 1851, not in Lexington but in the months just before he arrived there—in a swampy backwater in Florida, where young Brevet Major Thomas Jackson had finished his regular army career by doing something truly extraordinary: he had single-handedly transformed a small, sleepy garrison into a nightmare of recrimination, political infighting, and moral accusation.

  • • •

  Jackson’s return from the Mexican campaign was, inevitably, less than glorious. After a brief posting to a barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he landed at Fort Hamilton, on the coast of Long Island, about ten miles from New York City. Compared with the swashbuckling and high adventure of Mexico, this new life was commonplace. It gave him his first real taste of the often dreary, routinized life of the peacetime army, where promotion was slow, action rare, and political backbiting the order of the day. Though he was quartermaster and commissary of his unit, he spent much of his time on court-martial duty, traveling to upstate New York and Pennsylvania to sit on military juries, ruling on desertions and insubordination and drunkenness and other army sins. On the brighter side, the new life offered him free time. He attended an Episcopal church, where he was baptized, read the Bible, and began what would become a full-blown obsession with his health and diet, eating stale bread and plain meat to ease his chronically upset stomach, taking water cures, and doing “leaping” and “swinging” exercises that caused much curiosity at the fort.1 There he passed his twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth birthdays. In December 1850 he was reassigned to Company K of the 1st Artillery, and to a post that would soon make Fort Hamilton seem like a dream of happiness.

  This was Fort Meade, Florida, a three-day march to nowhere through swamp and pine forest from Tampa, itself a forlorn outpost of two hundred souls in the flat, humid, lake-pocked terrain of central Florida. (The entire state of Florida had only eighty-five thousand inhabitants, half of them slaves.) Fort Meade’s ostensible purpose was to protect white people from marauding bands of Seminoles—more specifically, those Seminoles who had not accepted the treaties under which they would be forced onto Indian territories in what is now Oklahoma. That there were hardly any of these Indians out there did not seem to matter. There had been much blood shed and money spent fighting them since 1817, and forts had been built and they all had to be staffed with armed men. Company K consisted of a commanding officer, fifty-two enlisted men, and four officers. They were the only human beings, as far as anyone knew, within ten miles of the fort. Jackson arrived there, with the rest of the company, on December 18, 1850.

  His posting started well enough. His job was again quartermaster and commissary, in charge of property, supplies, and food. His commanding officer was a portly, balding Baltimorean with a protuberant mustache named William H. French, who had graduated from West Point nine years ahead of him. The two men had known each other for three years, and, if they weren’t exactly friends, they seem to have been pleasant enough acquaintances. French invited Jackson to dinner several times in his first months there, where Jackson enjoyed the company of his wife, the lively Caroline Read French. Like Jackson, French was a stickler for duty and detail, and like Jackson he had won brevet promotions for valor in the Mexican-American War, and though he held the actual rank of captain (Jackson was a first lieutenant, one notch down), they were both brevet majors. They resembled each other in less benign ways, too: neither had an engaging personality, and both were ambitious for promotion and advancement. Unlike Jackson, French could be rude and abrasive.

  He was also more than just a perfectionist; he was a meddler as well. He insisted on involving himself with the smallest details of barracks life, and often found fault with those details. He wanted a formal report, for example, on why a musket belonging to one of the enlisted men had been damaged. When Jackson, presiding over a case of drunkenness and unsoldierly conduct, found the corporal guilty and recommended punishment, French rejected it as too lenient.

  Jackson came in for criticism in other ways, too. French dispatched him twice to find Indians. On both occasions, after marching long distances through jungles and swamps, Jackson failed to do so.2 French was furious, and fired off a note to army headquarters accompanying the report of Jackson’s second expedition with a vow “to go myself and endeavor to turn the Southern and eastern point of the lake,” rather than “throw it on my subalterns should Indians be on the other side at this season which is ‘corn planting time.’ ”3 Jackson chafed under all this. He was unhappy. His health declined, notably his eyes, which were most likely afflicted by a condition known today as uveitis, an inflammation of the iris and pupil that causes eye aches, bloodshot eyes, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, and floaters. He may have suffered from dyspepsia as well. In February he tried and failed to transfer to another post.

  Relations between the two men continued to deteriorate. As company quartermaster, it was Jackson’s responsibility to supervise the construction of several buildings at the fort. He considered this an important part of his job. Now French began to assert control over the process, overriding Jackson’s orders and making his own changes. Jackson’s unhappiness soon gave way to anger. Whenever he encountered French at the fort, Jackson averted his eyes, an old military practice known as “cutting.” French did the same, though in Jackson’s case the behavior bordered on insubordination.4 They spoke to each other only about official matters, and only when necessary.

  Finally, Jackson could take it no longer. He wrote a formal protest to the commanding officer in Tampa saying that French was interfering with his rights as quartermaster. French, angered by Jackson’s righteous nitpicking, blasted back in his own note to Tampa.5 Jackson, in fact, was way out of bounds. He was, in effect, asserting that he was entitled to an independent command within a company of fifty-two men and four officers occupying a small fort. He was insisting that he should not be subject to the normal command structures of the army. Six days later he received a categorical rebuke from Colonel Thomas Childs in Tampa, who stated pointedly that “the Gen’l Comdg. knows no state of military affairs where the Comdg. Officer can divide responsibility with a junior.” He also lectured Jackson: “A difference of opinion amongst Officers may honestly occur on points of duty. It ought never to degenerate into personalities, or be considered a just cause for withholding the common courtesies of life so essential in an Officer & to the happiness & quiet of garrison life.”6

  Still, Jackson was not finished with French. This dispute had been about rank and authority. The next one, which exploded over two weeks in mid-April, was about morality. It began with gossip, specifically a scanda
lous story about Captain French that made the rounds of the garrison in early April. The thirty-five-year-old French lived at the fort with his wife, two small children, and a household servant named Julia. In the account Jackson heard, French had been seen walking alone with Julia in late afternoon and early evening on several occasions, both on the post and in the woods. The suggestion, delivered with a wink and a nudge, was that French and Julia were lovers. Jackson had also heard that several of Julia’s potential beaus among the enlisted men had understood that they were supposed to stay away from her because Captain French had “taken her for himself.” In a small, remote garrison, such a rumor would have spread quickly.

  And it might have remained a rumor had Jackson not decided to intervene. His reaction to the gossip was in some ways predictable. Adultery was a crime, both in the military and in civil society. It was also a sin against the laws of God—prohibited by the Sixth Commandment. So Jackson decided, without authorization, to conduct his own investigation—an extraordinary and risky move by a young first lieutenant against his commanding officer. If Jackson was fearless, he was also shockingly insensitive to what his action inevitably looked like: the opportunistic and even malevolent work of a disgruntled subaltern engaged in a highly visible power struggle with his commanding officer.